Thought leader interview series on Facebook and data privacy: In the wake of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony in front of Congress and the EU Parliament, I spoke with Joshua March, CEO of Conversocial, a platform that helps brands implement customer service over social media.

Bruce Rogers: What would life without facebook be like?

Joshua March, Founder and CEO, Conversocial

Conversocial

Joshua March: Customer service would be a lot worse in a world without Facebook! Facebook Messenger is the fastest growing customer service channel in the U.S.—now at 8 billion messages being sent between businesses and consumers every month, up from 2 billion just 12 months ago.

Social messaging channels like Messenger are transformational when it comes to customer service. They’re the only channels of customer service that have drastically improved the experience for users in recent memory, as they are so effortless and convenient to use. Who wants to wait on hold when you can just message a business the same way you’d message a friend? Social messaging is also incredible for businesses, who can now manage significantly more customer service conversations over messaging than they can over the phone, with fewer agents.

Without Facebook Messenger, we’d be back to the traditional call center, and who wants to phone a business? There are, of course, other social messaging channels (Twitter is great for customer care and Apple Business Chat is on the way), but none have the same mass adoption of Facebook right now.

Rogers: What privacy regulation do you expect to come to pass in the U.S. post Zuckerberg testimony and post GDPR?

March: I am hopeful that something similar to GDPR will pass in the US. In general, the complete lack of attention given to consumer privacy over the past couple of decades needed a correction and I think a movement in this direction is the right thing for society at large. Given that every U.S. company dealing with any customers in the EU need to follow GDPR anyway, it would make sense if U.S. regulation followed a similar path.

Rogers: Will regulation stifle innovation?

March: There always has to be a careful balance between protecting consumers and protecting the ability of companies to innovate, so any regulation does have to be handled carefully. At Conversocial we put in some serious development time upfront that now means that when GDPR requests come in, we can handle them quickly and easily with very little overhead. So while there is some investment needed, it’s by no means restrictive.

GDPR also increases the potential penalties if a company loses personal data, and was found to be negligent in how they protected it. Given the huge amount of harm that can happen to individuals if their personal data is lost or stolen by hackers (ruining their credit scores for example), companies really should be held accountable—if you’re holding someone’s personal data, you should ensure you’re keeping it safe. The fact is, companies should already be doing this—at Conversocial we’ve always prided ourselves on our industrial-strength security—so the burden is only on companies who aren’t following basic best practice today.

So, while companies do have to put some investment into ensuring they are GDPR compliant, the burden really isn’t that high for any company who is doing things the right way already.

Rogers: How will regulation and increasing attention to privacy and data provenance/usage impact the MarTech eco-system?

March: There are a lot of companies that make pretty shady use of personal data—the ease at which you can discover highly private information about people, if you’re willing to pay for it, would be pretty shocking to a lot of average consumers. So I think new regulation will force a clean up of a lot of these practices, especially around selling private information. If anything, I expect this will actually drive even more advertising budgets into the major players like Facebook and Google. They are not actually selling your personal data, but are able to target ads extremely effectively because they know so much about you. Many other adtech players don’t have direct access to consumer data, so they have to access it through other avenues and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those avenues get shut down in the next few years.

Rogers: What should marketing leaders do now to prepare for this new reality?

March: Make sure to have a clean house! Regardless of regulation, you should be taking the protection of customer data seriously. From a security perspective, breaches are becoming less and less acceptable, especially if it emerges you haven’t been following security best practices. And there is an increasing spotlight on how companies are using private data, with a very real PR risk if it turns out you’ve been buying or selling private data in a way that consumers (and the media) wouldn’t be happy with.